Could be a corrupted game file or malfunctioning video driver. I'd suggest running the games file check tool and double checking that you have the latest video card driver from either AMD or NVIDIA whomever your vid card is with.

Had the same issue with a 6950 with latest drivers. Character creation screen is black, although the text shows up as the mouse cursor moves over the appropriate areas. Rapidly switching through screens 1-3 seemed to fix the glitch. Then, when I got to the profession choice, only elementalist and warrior had models. This was for every race/gender combo and carried over through the remainder of the character creation process. Just for grins, I picked a necro with whatever the default settings were and entered the game. The intro cinematic was...oddly off...and blanked out once near the end. When I finally had control of my character, I watched as white and green circles swallowed up my screen! /yay

Choosing "Best Performance" did fix things. Manually adjusting settings did not fix things. Turns out picking "Auto-adjust" always gives me the white/green circles, while "Best Quality" or w/e always blacks out everything. In both cases, I still see nameplates on players and nearby NPCs. :S Choosing "Best Performance" then manually increasing all settings to max worked great.

No idea what sort of glitch this is. Couldn't find anyone last night who was having it, so I was thrilled this morning to find out I'm not entirely insane (on this one issue, at least).

oh, i have ati radeon 7850. The option to choose stuff like hairs, and height shows up but the toon itself does not show up left hand side.

---------- Post added 2012-08-25 at 12:02 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Krsqk

Had the same issue with a 6950 with latest drivers. Character creation screen is black, although the text shows up as the mouse cursor moves over the appropriate areas. Rapidly switching through screens 1-3 seemed to fix the glitch. Then, when I got to the profession choice, only elementalist and warrior had models. This was for every race/gender combo and carried over through the remainder of the character creation process. Just for grins, I picked a necro with whatever the default settings were and entered the game. The intro cinematic was...oddly off...and blanked out once near the end. When I finally had control of my character, I watched as white and green circles swallowed up my screen! /yay

Choosing "Best Performance" did fix things. Manually adjusting settings did not fix things. Turns out picking "Auto-adjust" always gives me the white/green circles, while "Best Quality" or w/e always blacks out everything. In both cases, I still see nameplates on players and nearby NPCs. :S Choosing "Best Performance" then manually increasing all settings to max worked great.

No idea what sort of glitch this is. Couldn't find anyone last night who was having it, so I was thrilled this morning to find out I'm not entirely insane (on this one issue, at least).

i will try what you did. How do you change the options-is that a launcher thing or inside the game thing?